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Painting Canada comes home to McMichael

There must have been a certain quality of other worldliness as the finest works of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven artists recently made their way to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg after a tour of three European cities.

A paintbox used by A.Y. Jackson on display at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. Personal artifacts were not on display at the London show. (Aaron Harris / For the Toronto Star)

Palette and brushes used by F.H. Varley on display at Painting Canada at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. Personal artifacts and photos were added to the the Canadian version of the installation to give Canadians a new perspective on the well know Group of Seven artists. (Aaron Harris / For the Toronto Star)

Back from its European tour, a new show of the Group of Seven helps viewers connect by exhibiting them with photographs and personal belongings of the artists. Here a photograph of A.Y. Jackson painting, is hung beside one of his paintings.
(Aaron Harris / For the Toronto Star)

Chief curator, Katerina Atanassova, worked to personalize the lives of the Group of Seven for the version of Painting Canada that is on exhibit at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, and demonstrate the work that went into the final paintings, but exhibiting them alongside the earlier visceral sketches.

Lawren Harris masterpieces on display at Painting Canada at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.

Rachel Brodie finishes the installation at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection readying it for it's Saturday opening. (Aaron Harris / For the Toronto Star)

McMichael Canadian Art Collection chief curator Katerina Atanassova shown with an archival photo, part of the Painting Canada installation, at the gallery in Vaughan. (Aaron Harris / For the Toronto Star)

By Daniel BairdSpecial to the Star

Fri., Nov. 2, 2012

There must have been a certain quality of other worldliness as the finest works of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven artists recently made their way to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg after a tour of three European cities.

Heading up the winding road to the gallery that has become a shrine to the artists’ creativity, trucks packed with the paintings would have passed the graves of six of the eight originators of the masterpieces: Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley, Lawren Harris, Frank Johnston, A.J. Casson and A.Y. Jackson. The only graves missing on that route are J.E.H. MacDonald and Tom Thomson.

And so it is in the shadow of its creators, that “Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven” — in all its splendid depth of material — makes its debut at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection Saturday.

The installation was originally designed as a grand introduction for Europeans to this country’s most famous artists. But by happy coincidence the effort that went into interpreting the collection for a mostly uninitiated audience may reinvigorate how Canadians view the work of artists who are household names, and give us new insight into their art.

In fact, ironically, showing “Painting Canada” to Canadians was an after-thought.

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Co-curated by Ian Dejardin (director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London), Katerina Atanassova (chief curator at the McMichael) and Anna Hudson (associate professor of Canadian art history at York University) the installation was the largest exhibit of Canadian art to travel to Europe. And travel it did, first to Dulwich last October, then to the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, Norway in January, and finally to the Groninger Museum in Groningen, Netherlands, in June.

But once it was decided to bring it home to the McMichael, the curators had to rethink how to present the works to a country where the artists’ works are so well-known.

“Each place the show has been, the installation has been a little different,” says Atanassova. For example, “in the Netherlands they installed the show alongside local landscape painters from the same period, so it was possible to compare them.

In Canada, the curators decided to add personal belongings of the artist to the exhibit to make a greater connection with viewers, prioritize works Canadians may not have seen before and emphasize the artists’ fame.

“At the entrance of the exhibit here, I created a wall collage of press clippings from the 1924 Wembley Exhibition in England, which is where the Group of Seven first got international recognition, and press clippings from this show in 2012,” said Atanassova.

“I’m trying to ask the question of whether we here in Canada can only value artists when they’re recognized abroad.

“There is so much work by these artists available in Canada that is not their best work that I thought it was important to present a show to Canadians that focuses on masterpieces; these works are really important to Canadian identity,” she explains.

Another difference between the European and Canadian installations is the use of numerous personal effects and photos of the artists. (Only one paint box of Tom Thomson’s was in the original London show.)

“We included wall text with quotes from the artists, artifacts and archival photographs,” Atanassova says. “I want visitors to have a real feel-touch-smell kind of experience, for them to get close to the personalities of the artists.”

Atanassova also notes that, “We also decided to do something fairly unique by marrying the artists’ finished studio paintings with their oil sketches. We travelled all over Canada to private collectors to find sketches,” Atanassova says.

Marrying big, iconic studio paintings with more intimate oil sketches made in the bush is the strongest and most original suit of “Painting Canada.”

Thomson and his Group of Seven compatriots were a rugged variety of plein air painters (it’s hard to imagine Claude Monet venturing out into the wilds of Algonquin Park), and their quick and dirty sketches are often more powerful and illuminating than their more polished works.

While Thomson’s The Jack Pine (1916) is an undisputed masterpiece, the sketch for the painting is more immediate, sensuous and even tactile; the pine and the sunset light condensed and sticky. Similarly, a sketch of Moonlight (1915), with its blurry, swarming dark purple hills, buttery moonlight flowing across the dark lake, is a quiet, solitary moment.

Frederick Varley’s dramatic Squally Weather, Georgian Bay (1920), with its wildly pitching pines and churning lake, is accompanied by a sketch that achieves an admirable level of compression, each stroke bearing the weight of whole passages in the larger painting.

The same can be said for the sketch that twins J.E.H. MacDonald’s The Beaver Dam (1919), where the snarl of the dam’s sticks, a canoe stranded upstream, is condensed into a flurry of thick, glistening marks.

One of the exhibit’s most sublime works is Lawren Harris’s eerie and majestic Mt. Lefroy (1930), an otherworldly peak swathed in a halo of light and cloud; the three attendant studies explore the mountain in different qualities of light and shadow.

“Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven” is at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Nov. 3 to Jan. 6.

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